This work was widely interpreted as an effort to forestall adoption of competing formats, such as the Open Document Format, and concerns were raised about whether the Office XML format was severely encumbered by the company’s patents. Despite these fears, Microsoft ultimately saw its efforts succeed. A recently granted patent, however, reveals that the entire effort took place while Microsoft had a patent pending that covers nearly any use of XML for storing word processing documents.

The situation with OOXML is actually worth further exploration too. In relation to another matter, our reader Ryan points out that “people understand that to some degree, it’s why OOXML and WMA aren’t exactly runaway hits with anyone that Microsoft hasn’t leaned on [...] but there are always a few out there that just save to whatever format the program defaults to and then get mad when you’re using, say, Office 2003, and it can’t understand Office 2007 XML [....] it’s not new, Microsoft has been doing that to force upgrades since at least Office 97.”

“There are always a few who always think everything that comes out of Microsoft is god’s own work and perfect as it is,” adds MinceR.

Ryan responds by saying: “I’d say their formats are spread more through ignorance on the part of the user than anyone who intentionally set out to use them. Microsoft is dumping the “back to school” laptops — all have Office 2007 Home and Student Edition on them for free. Microsoft is so desperate to spread OOXML that they’re giving away free copies of it on Best Buy laptops til next month I believe it was.”

We’ve already seen that in “harmonizing” copyrights thanks to the Berne Convention that it’s been made much more difficult for countries to correct mistakes (or even admit mistakes) with overly aggressive copyright laws. In fact, it’s created a situation where the only direction copyright law seems to go is towards stronger protection — almost always under claims of a need to “live up to international treaties.” If we created a single global patent system, you’d have that problem on steroids. Rather than being able to experiment and cut back on the excesses and problems of the patent system, the entire world would be stuck with a single system, and any changes to the regulations would be driven by those who benefit most from being able to abuse such monopoly rights.

The continued development of the knowledge economies in both China and India requires thoughtful, practical policies that will give the needed incentive and capacity to innovators while providing benefits to as many as possible. In contrast to the beliefs of many, further strengthened intellectual property rights are unlikely to provide a positive impact on the economies of China and India. Instead, the two emerging giants should dedicate maximum attention to the other ingredients of a knowledge economy while structuring, to every extent possible under international treaty obligations, their domestic intellectual property regime to provide the optimum balance between incentives and access, bearing in mind that to diffuse the gains from existing innovations, the latter is to be favored.

In summary, Microsoft has proven that is can still get away with serious and deliberate patent infringement [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] while it is also harming the patent systems worldwide. █

Microsoft disclosed the Internet Information Services (IIS) vulnerability on Monday and said Friday it’s still working on a security update to fix the problem. In the meantime, the advisory has instructions for a workaround, including disabling various elements of the vulnerable FTP (File Transfer Protocol) service to upload and download files.

So I work at Best Buy (insert boos and hisses) and I was doing some Microsoft ExpertZone training.

Well, the new one for Windows 7 allows me to get a $10 retail copy of Windows 7 after completing the courses. So I figured I’d get it and sell it for a quick buck. Now, during my training modules, a “Linux vs Windows 7″ module appeared.

Here is just one of the screenshots (down-scaled).

One of our readers laughs at what he calls “Vista 7 training”, adding that “Vista 7 provides none of the four promised things, choice, compatibility, familiarity or peace of mind. It’s a DRM upsell with a minor facelift that blows your old software away and confuses the crap out of the user for zero security gain.” Exposing and calling it what it really is, this reader summarises the situation as follows: “Windows 7 propaganda is laughed at in public by Best Buy employees.” Here is a Slashdot submission which calls it “Anti-Linux Training at Best Buy”:

Best Buy is one of the few national computer retailers that has survived Vista and the recession. Here’s how Microsoft is training their employees. It’s like a throwback from the badly discredited “Get the Facts” campaign.

“Microsoft themselves try to teach Best Buy employees to lie about Windows 7, and are called on it in public,” he adds.

Another person, Oiaohm, writes in our IRC channel: “Notice something funny about that training. Microsoft is mentioning Linux. You only do that if you fear your competitor, otherwise you just talk about your own product and hope the staff don’t know about the other.”

“Microsoft is mentioning Linux. You only do that if you fear your competitor, otherwise you just talk about your own product and hope the staff don’t know about the other.” –Oiaohm“I hope this guy has covered his identity,” says the former person, as “Best Buy and Microsoft will fire him for sharing [...] employees are fired for such things. There are plenty of people in line for the job. [...] Vista pushed many retailers into bankruptcy. Windows 7 will challenge what’s left. Best Buy is going the full Microsoft route and will pay a terrible price. They think they have it easy because no one else is left selling computers brick and mortar.”

The latter reader adds: “The best part of it [is] Microsoft screwed up. Always a percentage of people giv[en] a briefing will question it.”

“The question is,” he concludes, “will Microsoft have to cut their price before release? Microsoft has dumped out more free copies of Windows 7 than any other version of Windows. And it’s not even released yet.”

Going back to the Best Buy folly, Microsoft is clearly building an army of Microsoft salesmen even in other companies, not just Microsoft Stores. It’s a very medieval approach where suppression of minds and conformity are a live-or-die crossroad. In addition to obedient salespeople, Microsoft is now recruiting marketing people to throw house parties for a piece of software. How pathetic is that? Does anyone remember the “Show Us Your Wow” campaign that Bill Gates was hyping up? They called for contributions from volunteers who would hype up Vista, only to take down the “Show Us Your Wow” Web site a short time later (the contributions all vanished along with it).

60 Thousand Russian Teachers Will Learn Linux by the End of 2009

[...]

As part of the initiative, Russian schools have already received CDs with Linux and other open-source tools distribution kits so that such solutions could be installed even in the schools with no broadband internet access. But of course such a large-scale deployment is not that easy to carry out without help of qualified professionals who can make it possible.

“Businesses will all but ignore Windows 7 and most uptake will come from consumers.” –Anonymous“In other words,” explains one person in USENET, “Windows 7 will be another dud and its release will NOT result in another PC upgrade cycle. Businesses will all but ignore Windows 7 and most uptake will come from consumers. This would be disastrous for Microsoft’s credibility in the marketplace.”

Going a little sarcastic, he adds: “I wonder what Microsoft will come up with after the failure of Windows 7, a Windows XP Second Edition? I’m pretty sure another incremental Vista update won’t cut it with Wall Street so they’ll have to try something radical. How about porting the Windows UI to Linux or (more likely) FreeBSD? Might work, but far from certain.”

In exchange for these blows of reality, the Microsoft crowd strikes back by attacking GNU/Linux. Watch this one for example. It is the second such attack (almost identical) from the same author this week. We wrote about the first one right here. The author is collaborating with Microsoft (by his own admission) and he has a pattern of attacking Free software and GNU/Linux. Attacks on GNU/Linux are typically based on false market share statistics, whose connection to Microsoft we wrote about in:

According to statistics from one other source, GNU/Linux carries on gaining market share whereas OS X remains quite stagnant. Microsoft’s very own statistics (see Ballmer’s presentation slide below) show that GNU/Linux exceeds Apple in terms of market share on the desktop. Microsoft also considers GNU/Linux — not Apple — the #1 rival. It has repeatedly admitted this (even openly because it must) for many years. Linux has partly won the embedded market and the servers, but these days, desktop opportunities are within sight too. █

Summary: Please help us spot and deter the fakes (personal or affiliation)

WE PREVIOUSLY dealt with the issue of people who pretend to speak on behalf of this Web site. There was also the issue of people (trolls) who are leaving comments under my full name or surname, usually cursing people whom I know or making self-defeating statements under fake identity. One possibility is that the former type — much like the latter — is trying to piss people off and incite people against this Web site and against yours truly.

As explicitly stated some months ago, I no longer leave comments in other Web sites for precisely that reason, except for a few where I have a registered (and long-standing) account or places where I PGP-sign my messages. If people spot fakes (messages with my name where they don’t belong), please raise the issue. It seems like some sort of a smear campaign by impostering. Some people are leaving comments with BoycottNovell.com as their homepage, but I have no idea who these people are. █

WARNING (This is my honest view/perception and is not politically correct)

1. Many small business owners/small companies feel there is a lack of attention to their needs from Novell. That is to say Novell only listens to “Monster Enterprise Clients”

Solution: We form a group that combined has equivelant $$$ behind it to warrent attention.

2. Many resent replies from Novell people (although it is just their opinion) through the various mediums treat SMB’s and their staff as idiots. It comes off as if it comes from arrogant 20-something know it alls dictating what the community has to do. To quote some CEO’s and COO… “The SUSE/Novell people act like a bunch arrogant 20-something … that treat us and are staff like idiots.) SMB’s have to contribute more time/money/resources to keep openSUSE going. (Why should we when we are treated like idiots)?

Solution: Better communitcation. Some signs of improvement, but a strong feeling of being dictated, rather than lead”

The reduction of the support duration for openSUSE from 24 to 18 months has sparked a discussion among the openSUSE community about a free SUSE Linux version with long-term support.

This puts even greater pressure on Novell, whose security seems to be wobbly according to this new report.

An ongoing phishing attack against UK taxpayers is being given additional credibility by using a gov.uk domain. Sefton Council is hosting the phishing content on its Novel GroupWise 7.0 site at web11.sefton.gov.uk.

To make matters worse, the Ubuntu Technology Board voted on June 30, 2009 to make the Ubuntu desktop remix DEPENDENT on MONO! Since MONO is a clone of .NET, and .NET is owned and controlled by Microsoft, that means that Microsoft will, directly or indirectly, control the Ubuntu desktop in future releases, unless the UTB comes to its senses and reverses itself. Now, consider this: GNOME is built using C and the GTK+ API, and compiled with gcc. MONO (.NET) has it’s own API and GUI dialog frameworks, and is written using C#. There is NO NEED for GTK+ if GNOME because dependent on MONO. Expect the Ubuntu Technical Board, after a “reasonable” period of time to allow MONO based GUIs and utilities to gradually replace GTK+ counterparts, to announce that it is removing the GTK+ toolkit to “save room” on the ISO. That is the same reason it used to remove GIMP from the ISO in favor of MONO.

So, the Ubuntu Linux user doesn’t have to install SAMBA to have a fully functional desktop. Currently, if the Linux user removes the files dependent on libmono* it will disable only half a dozen applications, none critical to Linux. HOWEVER, when GNOME becomes dependent on MONO one will NOT be able to remove MONO without making GNOME inoperable.

“GreyGeek’s response is here,” tells us a reader (via E-mail), who adds that “IMHO, pretty well sums up why Mono is not a good thing and gives me even more reasons to not use any of the *buntus.” GreyGeek has also written about the personal attacks I’ve been receiving, with Jose_X adding his own point of view. Generally speaking, the pattern at Microsoft/Mono’s side of things remains one of suppression and cyber-bullying. Jason has called it “pro-Mono zealotry”; neither users nor developers actually want Mono. █

“The patent danger to Mono comes from patents we know Microsoft has, on libraries which are outside the C# spec and thus not covered by any promise not to sue. In effect, Microsoft has designed in boobytraps for us.

“Indeed, every large program implements lots of ideas that are patented. Indeed, there’s no way to avoid this danger. But that’s no reason to put our head inside Microsoft’s jaws.”

It has been abundantly clear for a while — also based on input from our informants — that Google was partly influenced by Microsoft employees whom it hired*. There are (or were) some very major ones among them. The good news is that one of them is now leaving.

Lee Kai-Fu, who joined from Microsoft in 2004, will step down as president of Google in greater China in September, the company said.

When he joined, Microsoft sued Google and Mr Lee, claiming he had violated an agreement that prohibited him from working for a rival for one year.

Now, where do you think Apple and MS might have learned this salubrious lesson, my fellow geek-watchers? Could it have been largely from watching Linux take off in Netbooks and cheap PCs? Might it possibly have something to do with the remarkable success of the Ubuntu Linux product and its increasingly sophisticated, feature-rich, but eminently small and functional OS? Linux desktops, led by GNOME and KDE, along with distros such as Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Linux Mint, and MEPIS, have been quietly carving the path that the corporate monsters of the software industry have at last chosen to follow: make thy kernel light, stable, and versatile, and let thy desktop be smart and slim, with only enough features to support and enhance the user’s experience, and no more.

And incidentally, would it be too much to ask of Mr. Ballmer or Mr. Jobs to simply say so, to give credit where it’s due? No, that wouldn’t be the corporate thing, the profitable thing, the we’re-number-one thing, the competitive thing to do. It would only be the fair thing.

Desktop

The trouble with this assumption — like many others — is that it easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. All interface designers that I met have told me that it is impossible to design a desktop application that includes all possible functionality or meets the need of every possible user. Besides, they add, if you tried, users would suffer the anxiety of having too many choices. And so you get file managers, for instance, that have less than a third of the functionality of basic commands like cp or mv.

Cathy and Earl Malmrose founded ZaReason several years ago. ZaReason is a Linux OEM that has long intrigued me for a number of reasons: they encourage customers to open their boxes and tinker, they specialize in OEM Linux boxes, and they demonstrate that there is still room for independent shops in the rough-and-tumble world of computer retailing. In many ways the independents out-perform the big businesses as they understand Linux and Linux users, and a Linux-only shop doesn’t have to contend with the pressures and restrictions that Microsoft puts on its partners.

One of the powers of the Linux command shell is the wealth of commands available to accomplish most any task. That amount of power can be intimidating to the less experienced users. Most typical computer users rarely open up a terminal window, or a DOS command box in Windows, unless they need to do some trouble shooting.

When you’re used to the world of Windows or OS X, Linux can seem a little unforgiving. Not only does command-line access hand over the complete keys to the manor to any unwitting user with access to the administrator’s account, there’s rarely a safety net should things go wrong. Despite advances in most Linux desktops (where the ubiquitous Trashcan safely buffers deleted files), you get no such protection from most system-specific configuration, installation and maintenance tools. And while it’s rare for anything to go wrong without your direct input, some accidents do happen, especially if you enjoy tinkering with the latest distro release each month. But this being Linux, there’s plenty you can do to dig yourself out of a hole, which is why it’s always a good idea to have a repair-worthy distribution close to hand when performing configuration and installation tasks.

Eyecandy is also very important. Most new and non technical users are not interested in code. What they see is the GUI. Make their distro look very cool and pretty and they will fall in love with it. You can get themes from Gnomelook.org. Lots of people like Apple computers because of aesthetics. This might seem superficial to you but we are talking about the non technical users switching over to Linux. Another great application is Compiz. If their computer is powerful enough you can give them excellent eyecandy with compiz. With themes and cool 3D effects you will be able to make their Linux desktop nicer than Windows or Mac OS. Show them a little razzle dazzle.

As a follow up to the Mesa 7.5 release that occurred back in mid-July, Brian Paul has now announced the release of Mesa 7.5.1. This point release brings a number of bug fixes and minor improvements, while a plethora of new work over the past few months has been going into what shall become Mesa 7.6.

The flexibility and extensibility of support for Linux file systems is a direct result of an abstracted set of interfaces. At the core of that set of interfaces is the virtual file system switch (VFS).

Applications

Opera’s browser share seems to be slipping a bit, at least according to the stats over on W3Schools. Chrome is making inroads with 7% of the market, Firefox commands 47.4% (slightly down from July), and Opera is at 2.1% for the third month in a row — which is down from 2.3% at the beginning of the year.

What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Improved Gecko integration by using Wine’s network layers.
– Use of external libmpg123 for mp3 decoding.
– Support for JPEG and PNG formats in WindowsCodecs.
– Many regression test fixes for Win64 and Windows 7.
– Various bug fixes.

I wanted to take a few minutes and share a couple of games that I enjoy quite often. I’ve never been one for the shoot-em-up games, rather I prefer games that put my brain to work solving problems. There are many “brain games” available for Linux, but I would like to let you know about two games that I use to feed my puzzling addiction.

Desktop Environments

The KDE community is proud to announce the location of next year’s Akademy: Tampere, Finland. Akademy is the yearly world conference held by the KDE community to celebrate the Free Software desktop and work towards the future of KDE.

After a successful Akademy 2009 on the Canary Islands, as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Akademy heads north to the birthplace of Linux where contributors will enjoy the midnight sun as they spend a week to present, plan and participate in the development of KDE software.

This week we saw finishing of work on new color management code; updating of libraw to stable 0.8.1 (28 new cameras comparing to previous 0.7.x stable release, API extension and fixes); optimizations in thumbnails display; preparations for 1.0-beta4 (released on 31st August).

Without a doubt digiKam has a lot to offer for the photographers among us. Unfortunately, it still has one glaring omission – a clone tool. You may have noticed that the original RAW image had some dust specks in the sky above the trees and in other parts of the clouds. In digiKam, the only tool available for trying to remove such things (other than cropping them out as I did here) is a tool called In-painting, found under Enhance > In-painting. However, that tool is not easy to use and is rather slow. With a proper clone tool, as available in most other photo editors, removing such items only takes a few seconds. The good news is that the digiKam developers have acknowledged this omission as a bug and we can expect to see it implemented in a future version of digiKam. In the mean time we can use the Gimp to take care of these items as a final touch up step.

I think you will agree that digiKam is an amazing open source tool. It has now become my main photo editor. If you are into photography, why not give it a try?

Experienced Linux administrators are likely to feel “right at home” with the installation process – I certainly did. Just about everything is there, presented clearly for your selection. It took me about an hour to get it installed on MMS. The only significant stumble was that Slackware uses the LILO bootloader, which I choose not to use, but even that wasn’t a major problem for me because I have to keep the openSolaris GRUB as the bootloader anyway, so I just told it to skip the LILO installation, and added Slackware to the openSolaris GRUB configuration file manually.

Red Hat Family

In the past few days, since I’ve been spending time at my sister’s house, I’ve used as single system the laptop I bought a few months ago, with runs Fedora 11. This has been my first time, since I started working in Gentoo, that I had to work with just a laptop (if you exclude the hospitalisations) and especially the first time since I started using Gentoo that I had to work with just another Linux distribution.

I’ve been using RHEL and its twins, CentOS and Oracle Unbreakable Linux, since day one, and I like them a lot for business server use. Of these releases, RHEL 5.4 is the most impressive of the lot, for these reasons:

Red Hat has released RHEL 5.4, a major point update of its commercial Linux distribution. This version introduces support for KVM, a significant milestone in Red Hat’s evolving virtualization strategy.

The distribution itself is a customized version of Red Hat Enterprise, with the most recent build dating from July 21 (for the 4.x branch). Most of the changes are on a site-specific basis — for instance, customizations for Fermi’s work as opposed to CERN.

GateIN melds JBoss Portal technologies with the eXo portal to create a new portal framework. Red Hat originally announced the partnership with eXo in June and the today’s availability of GateIN is the first deliverable.

1. Open Sourcing Clouds: Red Hat is warning attendees not to get locked into “proprietary” clouds from Microsoft (Windows Azure) and VMware, among others. Red Hat also took a few subtle shots at Oracle. Read between the lines and Red Hat sees the software market as a four horse race: Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware. For the sake of political correctness, The VAR Guy listed the four vendors alphabetically and refuses to choose favorites.

During his keynote presentation at the Red Hat Summit 2009 conference in Chicago, Whitehurst covered Red Hat talking points, including how the company is working to build future IT architectures that are flexible and allow its customers to meet demands of their own internal customers. Ellison, on the other hand, presents the opposite of flexibility, according to Whitehurst.

“Do you want to buy into Larry Ellison’s vision of what your IT infrastructure should be and what functionality you should provide to your customers, or should you listen to your customers and be flexible,” Whitehurst asked the crowd.

The EU Commission has just released a press release. They are not going to approve the Oracle takeover of Sun just yet anyway. Instead they are launching an in depth investigation of the deal, and it’s MySQL that seems to be the issue. Here’s the press release. This doesn’t mean it won’t happen, and the deadline for a final result of the investigation is January 19, 2010. But they are certainly asking the right question, namely, what happens to MySQL in Oracle’s hands?

Declaring that Microsoft and VMware will not drive cloud interoperability, Red Hat on Thursday detailed projects to proliferate use of clouds, including Project Hail, for putting applications onto a cloud.

Ubuntu

A PSE Ubuntu expert would working as a single point of contact for Canonical’s larger customers, becoming “virtual team members” with the company’s IT staff. Canonical says PSEs will provide regular technical and service reviews, share best-practice wisdom, and help companies optimize Ubuntu environments. Apparently, PSEs will even serve as advocates for the company for future Ubuntu releases.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu project, announced today an advanced service and support offering that gives large enterprises with complex IT environments a highly-skilled, dedicated Canonical support professional.

Pre-releases like this are not recommended for anyone who needs a stable system or who isn’t comfortable with “occasional, even frequent breakage”, and should not be used on production systems. Ubuntu 9.10 is scheduled to be released on October 29th, 2009.

A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the fifth alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) operating system, due for release in late October this year. As usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 9.10 development.

There are still quirks and such, we can’t yet get it to install ubuntu restricted extras by default, although we have gotten skype, libdvdcss2 and java to install by default, but once sorted out these OEM machine installs will have all the updates, all the common desktop packages, anything extra we want to add including replacement gdm theme or extra docs / manuals and it’s must less hassle than a CD or USB boot media.

Lubuntu

The just released test version of Lubuntu is a 340MB Live CD image and is based on the in-development upcoming version of Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala. The small size of the ISO image is not just down to the use of LXDE though; the distribution is also missing applications, such as office software.

Update: When asked exactly how the software can be obtained, MontaVista explained that separate licenses for MontaVista Linux 6 and SDK can be purchased by emailing the local sales department. Once the transaction is complete, a code will be sent allowing access to “MontaVista Zone” where the relevant downloads are available.

Mobile

While most wireless carriers have pledged support for the Android camp, T-Mobile’s G1 and myTouch 3G (also manufactured by HTC) are the only phones currently available Stateside powered by Google’s open-source platform.

The Android mobile operating system has officially expanded to a second U.S. wireless carrier. The HTC Hero smartphone, sporting the Google-backed Android OS, will be offered by Sprint this October; meanwhile, T-Mobile still also offers a line of Android handsets. The Hero is a feature-rich smartphone with a competitive price, but will it bump up against another top-shelf Sprint phone, the Palm Pre?

That’s the Android operating system running on this fairly slick looking ARCHOS tablet, which is concrete proof that Android is headed for more than just smartphones. As JKOnTheRun notes, the ARCHOS 5 Android-based Internet Tablet isn’t scheduled to go on sale until September 15th, but online retailer B&H jumped the gun and has a 500GB version of it shown and listed on its site. The ARCHOS 5 is a 5-inch slate, and JKOnTheRun reports that at one time B&H listed both HDD and SSD models, with prices ranging from $294 to $420, depending on configuration. Those specs have since been removed.

A Taiwanese research group unveiled a personal Internet device (PID) on Thursday made from its WiMax chips and a reference board that runs a version of Google’s Android mobile operating system tweaked for PIDs.

The Nokia N900 has some powerful guts. The device packs a powerful ARM Cortex-A8 processor and has 1GB of memory for running applications. The N900 also features OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration, opening a window of opportunity for high-quality mobile games.

Sharp says the device is targeted as users who look for a device that rolls Internet access, an electronic dictionary and an e-Book function into one. The PC-Z1 goes on sale in Japan on September 25 for $450 (in white and black). Sharp hasn’t said anything about international sales plans yet.

Finally, this week Inforworld.com named another open-source ERP provider, Compiere, as a recipient of its annual “Bossie” award in the Best Open Source Enterprise Software category. Compiere is another strong contender in the small-business ERP market; among other features, it offers a very well-regarded, cloud-based implementation of its ERP solution.

[...]

The other, based on an Ubuntu Server software stack, is being positioned as a better solution for companies that want more control over server configuration, including the use of complementary third-party components. Both are suitable for deployment as single-server solutions.

The current economic recession may be pummeling companies around the globe, but amid all the dire reports and grim statistics littering what can only be compared to a bloody battlefield, one oft-cited exception appears to be still standing tall: free and open source software.

AbiWord 2.7.10 Beta – Open source word processor, AbiWord, mainly fixes bugs associated with plugins but there are also a handful of fixes for some cross-platform issues. You’ll also want to check out this beta version if you’ve been having issues with importing and exporting Open Office XML docs.

Blender 2.49b – This is a full-blown point release of the powerful 3D modeling application that’s so powerful some artists use it to create full-length animated films.

Within about a year, after the camera is developed to his satisfaction, Levoy hopes to have to have the funding and the arrangements in place for an outside manufacturer to produce them in quantity, ideally for less than $1,000. Levoy would then provide them at cost to colleagues and their students at other universities.

The concept of hacking digital cameras has been around for a while, and there are even books on how to hack filters, hack remote controls for cameras, and more. For the Frankencamera effort, though, researchers envision an open source community contributing camera customizations that become available to everyone. I can envision some photography junkies that I know getting behind that idea.

Events

Calling all artists: If you want to try your hand at creating images as spectacular as the one on the left and win a prize for them, then you need to enter the Blender World Cup 2009 contest. This year’s topic focuses on “the other world which should contain fantasy, creativity, and interest.”

Maybe the most important thing you can do that day is learn more about Software Freedom and reflect on how it applies to you and your community. Checkout The Free Software Definition, learn Why Schools Should Use Exclusively Free Software and understand why Your Freedom Needs Free Software. Don’t take these at face value; think about them, and form your own opinion. Then act.

In March 2009 Cash4Gold filed a lawsuit, eventually obtaining a default judgment and injunction against the former employee “publishing any more confidential, proprietary information, and any defamatory information on the internet.” In July, Cash4Gold contacted Consumerist.com and Complaints Board, demanding that they remove the postings referring to the former employee’s allegations.

Intellectual Monopolies

After winning a $675,000 judgment against student Joel Tenenbaum, the RIAA is also demanding an injunction against him. Seems they aren’t amused that he appeared on The Pirate Bay’s front page, even if he had nothing to do with it.